The Riga municipality will continue increasing the use of the Latvian language in the kindergartens of the capital, the responsible department of the Riga City Council has stated in reaction to calls to switch all kindergarten groups to the official language.

On Thursday, August 22, the Education, Culture and Sports Committee of the Riga City Council discussed at the proposal of the national-conservative National Alliance the possibility to introduce in all preschool institutions, administered by the City Council, education programmes in the Latvian language.

«We take steps every year to open new Latvian-language groups and the proportion of institutions, which use both languages [Latvian and Russian – BNN], has increased,» said Ivars Balamovskis, the acting director of the Education, Culture and Sports Committee of the Riga City Council.

According to the official, over the past five or six years, the municipality is mostly establishing only Latvian-language groups.

Yet the largest problem was the availability of teaching staff, as even in kindergartens, which would be ready to switch its groups to the Latvian language, the process is held back by the lack of teachers.

In Riga, in the coming school year of 2019-2020, preschool education will be provided in 146 kindergartens. 76 of them will teach children in Latvian, 40 – in both Latvian and an ethnic minority language, and 38 would only offer education in an ethnic minority language.

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